In the Bleak Midwinter

  Route 9 North was well-trafficked and easy to drive, even though the plows hadn’t been out yet. She exited near Lake Lucerne and took River Road south. To her left, the Hudson River ran high and fast, carrying away clots of snow and ice in its gray waters. Far fewer cars kept her company here. Snakes of snow slithered across the road, obscuring the macadam. She glanced at her directions. The right onto Tenant Mountain Road turned her due west, but there was no sign of impending sunset behind the hills ascending in front of her, only an iron shell of sky and the snow, falling faster and harder against her windshield. Infrequently, she passed houses, their lights glowing through the swirling flakes like figures inside glass snow globes. Beautiful and unreachable. The sense of isolation pricked at her. Skittered. She turned the radio up for its illusion of company.

  She spotted Alan’s Gas and Grocery, the landmark mentioned in her directions. From here it was two miles to the road leading directly up into the mountains. It was a small general store with lighted signs blazing cheerfully if commercially through the storm. COCA COLA! BUDWEISER! DIESEL, $1.00! She almost pulled over. It would be dry and safe, there would be a phone, she could admit she was too inexperienced to be driving in this weather and call—who? One of the congregation? A taxi?

  She gritted her teeth. Russ was the only person she considered enough of a friend to ask for a favor like that. She drove past the entrance to the grocery’s tiny parking lot. How could she come begging for a ride like a stranded teenager after yesterday? She blew out a gusty breath. Her inexperience at winter driving, and the unfamiliar landscape, were making her jittery. If she calmed down, drove carefully, and didn’t run scared to the nearest big, strong man to save her, she’d be fine. Alan’s Gas and Grocery disappeared from her rearview mirror. Two miles to the turnoff. Six miles to the camp road. Less than a mile to the cabin. Even if she had to drop down from her current speed of thirty miles an hour, it shouldn’t take her more than twenty minutes. Then she would whap Kristen upside the head for not leaving a phone number where she could be reached.

  She slowed as she hit the two-mile mark. Her headlights shone blurrily through the gathering dark, their edges softened by the snowfall, their light swallowed up in the storm. Two large stone cairns marked the otherwise signless road. Hidden under white, they looked like lean and misshapen snowmen, and she was suddenly sorry she had thought Mrs. McDonald’s plastic snowmen were tacky. On a night like this, they would be beacons of hospitality, marking the boundary between safety and the storm.

  She set the trip odometer to zero, turned, fishtailed, over-compensated, then recovered. The MG pulled steadily along the line of ascent. The trees closed in heavily, shrouding the road, giving some protection against the full force of the snowfall. The twilight turned the sky, the air, the snow shades of underwater blue, as if she were piloting through a drowned world. She downshifted, and the engine growled as her tires churned through the light, dry snow. The headlights picked out a few well-covered tracks, but no one had driven through recently enough to compact the snow, which made it easier for her front wheels to get the traction she needed.

  The road wound its way up the mountain, never stretching more than a few car-lengths before disappearing around another bend. There was still light enough to clearly see the outlines of the culverts on either side and Clare kept her speed to a steady twenty-five miles an hour, grateful she wasn’t trying to navigate the twisty turns in total darkness. She passed an opening in the trees and realized it must be another camp road. She bit her lip. Kristen had better have been dead-on accurate about the miles to the turnoff, or she was going to be lost but good on this God-forsaken road.

  Rounding the next bend, she saw twin lights, small and bright as halogen bulbs, windshield-high in the middle of the road. She slammed on the brakes at the same moment the lights resolved themselves into eyes and her car skidded past harmlessly as a buck bounded off the road into the cover of the brush. She swore out loud for the first time in three weeks and it felt so good she continued to rain down curses on every deer in New York State as she coaxed her car into a straight line and slowly, slowly accelerated.

  A mile up the mountain, there was another narrow, unmarked road, barely visible through the encroaching trees. Unplowed, of course. She was beginning to worry about getting through the camp road to Kristen’s cousin’s cabin. The snow was piling higher with every minute, deep enough to seriously impede her car, deep enough to make the mile walk an unthinkable misery in her lightweight boots. She turned off the radio, the better to hear the sound of her tires slurring through snow. She would just have to chance making it as far as she could toward the cabin, and if she got stuck, she would lay on the horn until Kristen came. Let her bear the burden of finding some decent footwear for slogging through the rest of the way.

  The trip odometer crawled toward the six-mile mark. She speeded up the wipers, peering through the curtain of snow for the entrance to the camp road. The light had leached almost entirely away by now. She tried switching her high-beams on, but the dizzying flurry of snowflakes through the field of light and the reflected glare from the snow on the road was disorienting.

  Up ahead there was a gap in the wall of trees. She slowed, and unrolled her window for a better look. It was hard to tell, but the faint depressions under the new-fallen snow seemed to be tire tracks from earlier in the day. She rolled the window back up and carefully turned onto the camp road.

  Thankfully, it sloped downhill in a gentle, hillside hugging curve. Nothing requiring agile maneuvering from the already-overtaxed car. She glanced at the odometer. Almost there, although between the watery blue darkness and the screen of trees and brush and the snow, she could probably drive into the front door before spotting it. Ahead, the road rose along a lengthy, uneven incline. She groaned. On a clear fall day, that hill would be nothing but a pleasant surge under her tires and the fun of watching the leaves scatter. Now . . .

  She clutched the steering wheel more firmly, downshifted again, and stepped on the gas. Hard. The back end shimmied, then lurched forward, pulling hard. Clare leaned toward the windshield, as if shifting her body weight could tip the balance in favor of an uphill climb. The engine keened.

  “Come on. Come on,” Clare hissed between gritted teeth. The car crept upward. “Almost there, almost there . . .” She tromped down on the gas pedal a final time, laughing in triumph as the front wheels dug in, held, and hauled her over the crest of the hill. She instantly surged downhill, the car twisting violently to the left, as if the roadbed were half eaten away. The steering wheel nearly jerked from her grasp. Clare yanked her foot off the gas and slammed on her brakes. The front wheels locked. She skidded downhill, the car swinging sideways, tipping. Clare fought for control, pumping the brakes, steering out of the high-velocity skid.

  She shrieked involuntarily as the car’s undercarriage slammed into something low and hard, then shrieked again, louder and longer, as she tipped for real this time, crashing and bouncing and crunching over and over.

  CHAPTER 23

  Stillness and dark. She heaved for air, shuddering gasps sounding abnormally loud in the silent aftermath. She hung from her shoulder belt, her left arm pressing against shattered glass and smeared snow. Her car had come to rest on its side. The remains of the driver’s side window showed slaggy rock. The windshield was intact, but half popped out of its rubber and chrome frame. Above her, like some crazy-cracked skylight, what had been the passenger-side window was slowly whiting out under the falling snow.

  She breathed in deeper and more deeply, feeling for pain in her lungs or ribs. She shifted her legs carefully. Her knees felt like someone had been hammering on them, but all her joints moved and nothing seemed to be grinding or poking out. She reached for the door handle above her. Something twinged nastily in her side. Her gloved hand came short. She swallowed. She had to get out of the car. Hitching her hip up, she fumbled at her seatbelt latch. As she slowly shifted her weight, leading headfirst toward the passenger-side
door, the car shivered. Metal screeched. Clare flung herself against the seats, clinging to the leather while the vehicle slid downward another half-foot, stopping with a kidney-bruising crunch. She was canted at an easier angle now, some of the car’s weight resting on its upslope side. She pulled at the passenger door latch. It stuck. She braced her boots on the remains of the driver’s door and yanked at the latch again, hunching over and throwing her shoulder against the door at the same time. It popped open with the scrape of metal against raw metal. Clare scrambled out.

  She balanced unsteadily on a steep field of boulders and jagged rock, halfway down a crevasse that cut through the mountain as far as she could see upslope and down. Five or six yards beneath her it bottomed out in a wide stream, whose black waters ran fast enough to have kept it from icing over despite the past three days of below-freezing temperatures. Above her, the camp road slanted down to two blocky cement pilings and then vanished into thin air. Her car had gouged a scar along the snow, the pilings, the rubble, and scree. Reluctantly, she looked at the MG. She made a small noise in the back of her throat, resolutely turned away, and picked her way uphill slowly, testing each foothold as she climbed. When she reached the cement pilings, she propped her backside against one and rubbed her knees vigorously. Across the gorge, there might have been twin pilings underneath the unmarked snow. Hard to tell. There was certainly more road there. She could see the cleared width of it between the trees. A bridge had been here. Once.

  Clare stamped her feet, knocking away some of the snow clinging to her boots. If there was a cabin in the woods over there, no one had gotten to it by this road. Which meant either the directions got garbled between Kristen and Lois, or she had taken a wrong turn somewhere, or . . . she looked again at where the road simply vanished. Or someone had sent her here. Deliberately. The thought made her stomach clench and her skin prickle coldly.

  She pushed herself away from the piling and hiked the rest of the way up to the crest of the road. Whichever it was, mistake or malice, she was in a bad way. She was close to ten miles away from the last outpost of civilization she’d seen, and although her parka and sweater were keeping her upper body warm, she could already feel goose bumps beneath her cotton khakis. Her boots were a bigger problem. Even with heavy woolen socks, her toes ached with cold. How would she feel after one mile in the snow? After five? At what point would she stop hurting and start permanently damaging her flesh?

  She pulled the parka hood up and tied it under her chin. The fake fur edging tickled her cheeks. Normally, she could walk a mile easy in fifteen minutes. She started down the road, stepping inside the rapidly filling tire tracks. Fresh snow, packed snow, uneven terrain—say it would take half again as long to go a mile. Twenty-two minutes or so.

  Her heel came down on something slippery and loose. She skidded, flailed, and landed hard on her backside, grunting. She picked herself up, beating snow off her pants. Make that twenty-two minutes plus time to fall down and get back up again.

  At the side of the road, a dead branch was wedged between the fork of a tree. Clare yanked it loose. It was straight and spar-like, thin enough for her to grasp in one hand and long enough to test the depth of snow a few feet ahead of her. She knocked off the snow crusting its bark and continued on, bracing her steps with the stick.

  All right. Ten miles to Alan’s Gas and Grocery would take her four to five hours. What about another cabin? She could hike down the mountain until she reached the closest camp road. She had passed one two or three miles before reaching her turnoff. If it was another mile to a cabin it would still be less than half the distance to the store. She could have shelter. Blankets. Probably a fireplace. Maybe even, God willing, a working telephone.

  Snow collected on her cheeks and chin. She scrubbed her face with her glove, trying to dry her skin as much as possible. Not heading straight for the Gas and Grocery would be risky, of course. If she couldn’t find a place within a mile of the main road, she would have to retrace her steps. She pulled the parka sleeve away from her wrist and lit up her watch. Almost five o’clock. By the time she reached the next camp road, it would be full dark. Could she trust herself to stay on a narrow, unplowed road at night with a heavy snow falling? Already the underwater blueness was thickening, making distance impossible to judge, swallowing the details of the forest only a few yards away.

  The thought she had been pushing aside crystalized, unavoidable. I could die out here. Her stomach lurched as if she’d dropped a thousand feet of altitude in a few seconds. She could become just one more missing person, her whereabouts a mystery to her family and friends, until some autumn day who-knew-how-many-years in the future, when hunters stumbled over her bones wrapped in a Millers Kill police parka.

  “God,” she said, her voice very small in the immense quiet of the woods, “I don’t want to die. Please help me.”

  She poked her walking stick into a particularly deep depression one of her tires had spun into the snow. There didn’t seem to be much more she could add to that prayer, unless it was, “and let me find the so-and-so who sent me directions to this place so I can throttle him or her.” No, that wouldn’t do.

  She braced and stepped, braced and stepped. The 139th Psalm. It had been a dim twilight, like this one, the sky dark with rain instead of lit by snow. She had been sitting by Grace’s bedside, her sister’s hand resting weightlessly in hers because it hurt Grace to be touched firmly. Their father had read the 139th Psalm in his deep, soft voice. “If I say, surely, the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” It had been the last time they had all been together. In the silence and the dark, so far from where Grace had lived and died, she felt an urgent closeness to her sister, a moment of absolute certainty that death was just a pocket-trick, that the dead were all around her, supporting her, giving her strength, pricking her with warnings to watch the road, watch the road—

  A dark shape emerged from the bend in the road before her.

  Clare blinked. Her heart thumped once, hard. She tightened her grip on her walking stick, wondering, even as she halted in her tracks, muscles tensing, why she wasn’t running forward.

  The bulky figure moved ahead another step. It was a person in a jumpsuit, one of those allover padded things they wore snowmobiling around here. Clare eased a fraction and opened her mouth to speak when a flashlight beam suddenly speared her.

  “Take off your coat,” a voice hissed.

  Clare squinted, dazzled by the sudden light, trying to make sense out of this bizarre sequence of events.

  “What?”

  “Off!” The voice was guttural, deep, like a man’s, but as unidentifiable as the figure behind it. The flashlight beam dipped low, as if the person had shifted it in his grasp, and Clare heard the distinctive sound of a round being chambered in an automatic pistol.

  Her throat closed. Heat surged through her body. She hurled her walking stick as hard as she could toward the flashlight and dove headfirst for the brush at the side of the road.

  The gun went off, shattering the stillness like an axe through thin ice, dwarfing a strangled scream of “Goddamnit!” A trio of deer exploded from a thicket of trees, careening into the camp road, the beating of their hooves echoed by wings everywhere overhead, winter birds fleeing in terror.

  Sprawled beneath a fir tree, Clare saw the flashlight beam arch crazily into the sky and took off, scrambling hand and foot downslope, away from the sounds of thrashing and swearing. She made it to her feet and ran a yard, two yards, three, before tripping over something buried in the snow and tumbling. She kept her momentum going, rolling forward, regaining her footing, dodging ancient oaks and dense, matted stands of fir, steadying herself on deadwood and saplings. Branches whipped her face. She changed direction, ran until she fell, pawed the snow from her face and shifted direction again. A long-thorned bush scratched and caught at her parka.
She plunged through snow up to her thighs, hauled up a slide of scree and branches, her heart pounding and her breath sawing in her ears as loud as jet exhaust.

  At a slight rise, she climbed a toppled pine tree and stood, gasping, to get her bearings. She couldn’t see any light from where she had come. Where she thought she had come from. She shook her head, disoriented. If, as she thought, her attacker had dropped his flashlight, as soon as he found it he’d be on her trail. Her all-too-obvious trail. She gulped air, turning away from where she’d been, staking out the lay of the land ahead. Somewhere to her left, hopefully not too far, was the mountain road. If she lost that, she was dead, whether the shadowy man in the snowmobile suit caught up with her or not.

  She struck out for where she thought the road must be at a diagonal, picking her route more slowly and carefully, jumping from treefall to treefall and squeezing under the thick shelter of hemlocks and firs whenever possible. She couldn’t leave a clean trail, but she could put breaks in it, make it hard to follow, slow him down.

  If she went straight for the road, it would only make it easier for him to catch her. Even if she could manage to run in the slippery snow, he must have a vehicle somewhere, not too far from where he ran into her, near the junction of the camp road and the mountain road.

  He had a gun. He had a flashlight, was dressed for the environment, was bigger and probably heavier than she was. He wanted her dead.

  She had . . . a branch of feathery needles whacked Clare in the face. She spat out the taste of pine tar. She had a head start. She would be able to see his flashlight a long way before he saw her. Her night vision would be sharper, not relying on artificial light. He was carrying something small-caliber, without much stopping power, so he’d have to get right in close to her in order to drop her. And one other advantage: he had underestimated her, and chances were he’d keep on underestimating her. Her survival school instructor at Egeland AFB, a shiny-headed old warrant officer nicknamed “Hardball” for obvious reasons, told them, “Biggest advantage any woman’s got in an escape and evasion situation is the fact that ninety-nine percent of the men she runs into won’t look past the fact she’s a girl! So don’t use your tits for brains!” The first time she had given up in an exercise, he made her do push-ups in the mucky Florida swamp water until she threw up. She had never surrendered again.